I am a medical and cultural anthropologist and Senior Research Scholar at the Center for Biomedical Ethics at Stanford.
In a nutshell, I care about improving medical care and making it more compassionate and attentive to the whole person. For the last 15 years, I've worked on improving medical care for people with intersex conditions (or disorders of sex development). My research on this topic was published in that lovely little book you see to the right called Fixing Sex.
I'm also keenly interested in the doctor-patient relationship, end-of-life issues, clinical ethics, and a bunch of other areas of medicine. For more information about me or my work, see the writing, speaking, and media sections of the website.
What's New
- March 31 - Interview with Mihir Gupta in H&P: The Stanford Medical Student Journal. Thanks Mihir.
- November 22 - Apparently Fixing Sex is good to teach with! A huge debt of gratitude to Beck Jordan-Young for such praise! I'm blushing.
- October 24 - New paper on the social and ethical impact of the biomedicalization of nicotine addiction.
- May 25 - A few quotes in"The Truth about Genderless Babies" on LiveScience.com about the couple from Toronto who is not telling others the sex of their child. The mom wrote a really lovely response to all of the media attention. Check it out here.
- May 22 - Silvia Camporesi and I wrote a little op-ed for the San Jose Mercury News on the new Olympic and IAAF rules that affect elite female athletes with DSD.